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Opinion

Opinion

Based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events.

Remembrance Day faker was just like us: Mallick

Dressing up as a soldier on Remembrance Day? Sad. The adoring look your tearful wife gives you as she looks up at your admittedly rather chic “beret with brooch” and considers your wartime bravery? Tragic. But giving an on-camera TV interview to CBC journalist Diana Swain at the National War Memorial in your fake outfit? Funny, pricelessly so.

Everybody wears a costume, a public declaration of what they do, while secretly hoping to pass themselves off as a competent rendering of that role. In some jobs, they’re lucky enough to be issued an actual uniform that does the work for them. Nurses gave them up but police, the military and bus drivers treasure them. The great irony of Toronto police officers ripping off their ID as they ran riot during the G20 demonstrations in 2010 was that they had turned a terrifying uniform into video game gear. Worse, police chief Bill Blair told them to admit it and they didn’t. There lies depravity, to march onstage in full gun-and-truncheon ensemble and then play the part of coward so very badly.

The Toronto Star ran a photo pointing to clues that “veteran” Franck Gervais, a beardy Ottawa man who worked in construction, was a poseur. There were 14 flaming signals, many of them “decorations,” a crucial word. I bought a medal in a Paris shop once to wear as jewelry — it’s a purple thing with a stamped circle to which you would add a pin if the French found you worthy which they never will — and an American woman went after me, demanding an apology in person at a local book fair. In the U.S., medals are generally awarded for gloriously killing, or helping to kill, other people. She didn’t realize that in France, you get medals for heel design and ruching. It’s a pretty medal; I’ll bestow it on a polite Paris waiter if I ever encounter one.

I respect good tradespeople. We have too few of them. Gervais built stairs, which is meticulous difficult work but doesn’t come with an ensemble. I see that the police in Chateauguay, Que. wore black cowboy outfits on Friday to protest changes to their pension rules. I avoid all men in law enforcement gear because I detest guns and the love of guns, but the Garth Brooks look — it’s better than the camouflage pants other Quebec cops wore that day — made the cops look like yearners.

And they are. We all are. People present the version of themselves to the world that they would like to live with. Most of us don’t wear caps, so we’re stuck with LinkedIn resumés and Twitter profiles which often contain self-puffery and outright lies as easily detectable to colleagues as those in Gervais’s chest ribbon gallery.

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To an older generation, “Mrs.” is an identity badge, to a younger, it’s nerd glasses. My I.D. is a mug shot and “columnist” in the byline but I’m continually harried by those who protest my having an opinion at all. It’s in my job description, I tell them, which does not help. Columnists should be issued special hats the same way 1930s movie directors wore jodhpurs and a monocle. Columns would have labels: “Stop Doing That” or “I Mean It, Stop Doing That.” “Our Nation’s Capital.” “This Week in Kittens.” “Let’s Get Slurpy.” I could target-label the column for print (“Jottings”) and online (“Artisanal”), and for the very attractive tablet audience I hope to cultivate next year, “Feck.”

It’s too easy to call Gervais a narcissist or his pose the male selfie, although that won’t stop me because the idea that women still take clothing off to be admired while men put clothing on is too intriguing to leave out. But equally his motive could have been fame hunger. “The craze of notoriety, the curse of the present age,” P.G. Wodehouse once had a character named Psmith sigh, but please note that Wodehouse began writing the Psmith novels in 1909.

Psmith was a long, thin youth in immaculate clothing — and yes, he wore a monocle — who tired of the name “Smith” so he attached a “P.” “There are too many Smiths and I don’t care for Smythe,” he said, explaining that the “p” was silent as in “ptarmigan, psalm and phthisis.”

There’s another Gervais of Canadian descent out there, a famous one, but “Ricky” was good enough for him. I’m almost wondering if the shyer Franck Gervais simply added a “c” to his unusual first name. He did a Psmith but this time with garments.

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